“But this fault is rare in Bunyan — far rarer than in Piers Plowman. If such dead wood were removed from The Pilgrim’s Progress the book would not be very much shorter than it is. The greater part of it is enthralling narrative or genuinely dramatic dialogue. Bunyan stands with Malory and Trollope as a …
The Artistic Temperament
“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs . . . But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, the very great artists are able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are many real tragedies of …
More Church Fights
“If a man were to see his wife being attacked by rapists, all his professions of love and deep concern are meaningless unless he fights for her. Under such circumstances, a refusal to fight does not stem from a love of peace, but rather from the now-revealed contempt he has for his wife. In the …
And Not the Rhymey-Dimey Stuff Either
“At all events, Milton was a Puritan born, and bred at the Puritan University, Cambridge, one of those Puritans out of whom came the civilization of our New England, and by that token essentially the prevailing civilization of our whole American Commonwealth” (Osgood, Poetry as a Means of Grace, p. 82). Although there are a …
Getting It Backwards
“Yet there is still a vast amount of talk about the isolated and uncommunicable spirit of the man of genius; about how he has in him things too deep for expression and too subtle to be subject to general criticism. I say that that is exactly what is not true of the artist. That is …
A Little More Standing Around
“A sound hermeneutic of anything can never be sustained without discipline. If a man wants a garden full of weeds, he does not need to do a thing. If a man wants his ability to play the piano to get rusty, he needs to do nothing. And if a church wants its lampstand removed, in …
The Greatest Wedding Song in the World . . . and by a Puritan
[Speaking of Edmund Spenser] “The point is that in those particular sonnets which all agree were addressed to Elizabeth Boyle, and supremely in his Epithalamion, the greatest wedding song in the world, he sings with the same full-throated ease, the same happy assurance that we hear in the contemporary and mature Hymn of Heavenly Love …
Unworthy of a Weed
“But in substance what I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed” (G.K. Chesterton as quoted in …
Evangelical Devolution
“Whatever disagreements existed among believing Christians in the era after the Second World War, evangelicals at that time were clearly doctrinal vertebrates of some description. But in recent decades, we have added more than a little money to the movement, some academic respectability, a lust for influence, and the result is the widespread existence of …
Original Puritanism
[Elizabeth I] “released their creative power. She was a Queen, not a King, and all that was left of medieval chivalry idealized her into an incarnation of England, a militant heroine inseparable in imagination from the brave, young new nation who was saving herself from those proud old foes, the Papacy, Spain, and France, that …